http://norman.walsh.name/2003/07/14/ieoddness 6 59 2003-07-14 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2003 Norman Walsh A plea for help. I'm getting reports of problems with IE and images, but I can't fathom the problem. (Updated again 15 July 2003: comments in JPEG files may be the culprit.) Over the past couple of weeks, I've had several reports from readers having trouble viewing images from this site in IE. I even managed to replicate the problem myself on Deb's laptop, though I was none the wiser for the effort. The symptom as described is that you go to a page that contains one or more images and the text loads fine in IE but the images never come up. The browser status area reports that it's waiting for some number of images and the browser keeps on chugging, but nothing is ever displayed. Server logs suggest that 43 or so percent of you are coming in with one version of Internet Explorer or another. Are only a miniscule percentage of readers experiencing the problem, or reporting it? I'm stumped. Intuition and a few moments casual testing suggest that I could work around it by making all the image links more explicit (removing all content negotiation from the equation) but I really don't want to. And I can't see why it should be necessary. Clues solicited. Update: 24 July 2003: After another week, I'm pretty sure it's the metadata (comments in JPEG files, actually). Below are two images: they are identical except that one has embedded metadata and the other doesn't. Many (most? all?) IE users, can only see the one without metadata. Update: 15 Jul 2003: I've removed image metadata from the thumbnail and scaled images. This should make both of the images above and most other images accessible. It's possible that full size images (the ones you get on if you click on an image on a page) will still cause problems. While I'm sympathetic, I'm very fond of my metadata and I'm not moved to rip it all out just to work around a broken browser.